[Plugin: WP Biographia] Problem

OK, let’s start with some basic information to see what’s going on.

You can login to your WordPress install and the 500 error happens after login?

What version of WordPress and of the plugin are you using?

Did this happen after installation of the plugin or an upgrade?

Can you access the dashboard if you manually remove the plugin from the plugins directory?

I can’t think why this plugin would cause a 500 error but let’s see what I can do to help track this down. I’ve certainly never seen or heard of this sort of major error being caused by WP Biographia.

-Gary

Gary,

Thanks for getting back to me.

You can login to your WordPress install and the 500 error happens after login?

The error happens whenever the WP Biographia plugin is installed.

What version of WordPress and of the plugin are you using?

WordPress version 3.3. WP Biographia 2.1.1.

Did this happen after installation of the plugin or an upgrade?

This happened shortly after upgrading WordPress. Before that I wasn’t having any issues.

Can you access the dashboard if you manually remove the plugin from the plugins directory?

Yes.

I can’t think why this plugin would cause a 500 error but let’s see what I can do to help track this down. I’ve certainly never seen or heard of this sort of major error being caused by WP Biographia.

Thanks for your help Gary. I really like the Wp Biographia plugin in I think its the best plug-in for author bio on a post or page.

The fact that this has happened after a major WordPress upgrade is … suspicious.

What would really help is if you can let me have a list of the plugins you have installed, in addition to WP Biographia, plus the name of the theme you’re using (and whether it’s a premium/paid for theme, a theme from the WordPress theme repository, or sourced from somewhere else).

That way, I can try and duplicate your environment and see if I can get this to be repeatable.

To be honest, the fact that you’re getting a 500 error is pretty serious and is indicative of something being majorly broken somewhere. I’m suspecting this may be more down to the WordPress upgrade, plus your other plugins and/or theme than the plugin (based on experience with this sort of thing), but let’s keep trying to track this down and nail the source of the issue.

-Gary

Plugin’s:
Akismet, All in One SEO Pack, Better Author Bio, Broken Link Checker, contact form, Disqus, global translator, health check, landing sites, Meta Tag Manager, page links to, podpress, Referrer Detector, RefTagger, RSS Syndication Options, sharethis, Subscribe Remind, theme preview, theme switch, WP-Print, WP Mobile Detector, and WP Super Cache.

Theme: I’m using Polished by Elegant Themes it’s a premium/paid theme.

As I mentioned I went through all the plugin’s and checked them for the problem I mentioned above. The only one that causes an issue is WP Biographia.

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you … the Christmas Holidays have given me some offline time.

What I’ll do is to try and replicate your setup as much as I’m able on a local WordPress install and see if I can get this to recur. If I can, then this will give me some pointers to what’s going on here.

I’ll post back here as soon as I’m able to …

-Gary

I’ve made some progress but haven’t yet been able to duplicate this issue.

What I’ve done is taken a fresh WordPress install and installed it locally on one of my machines. I then installed each of the plugins you have listed and after installation and activation, logged out of the dashboard and logged back in again.

One of the plugins, Disqus, I wasn’t able to test fully as the Disqus web service will only work with publicly facing WordPress installs, and as my test installation is behind my firewall on a local machine, Disqus can’t “see” localhost.

One other point of note; a lot of the plugins you’re using either double up functionality (such as Better Author Bio and WP Biographia) or partially double up functionality (such as All In One SEO Pack and Meta Tag Manager); this isn’t a problem per se, but you probably don’t want two biography plugins or meta-tag manager plugins active at the same time.

Also, I’ve noticed that a lot of your plugins aren’t compatible with WordPress v3.3 … Akismet, Better Author Bio, Disqus, Global Translator, Health Check, Landing Sites, Meta Tag Manager, PodPress, Referrer Detector, RefTagger, RSS Syndication Options, Share This, Subscribe Remind, Theme Preview, WP Mobile Detector and WP Super Cache are all compatible with WordPress v3.2.1 and earlier but not v3.3. This isn’t necessarily a problem but it does introduce another level of testing problems.

I used the Better Plugin Compatibility Control plugin (https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/better-plugin-compatibility-control/) to get this information; I know it’s adding another plugin into the mix but I made sure I couldn’t replicate the problem both before installing this plugin and after deactivating and removing the plugin.

Finally, while installing and taking the minimum or default configuration for all of these plugins hasn’t reproduced the problem, that doesn’t mean that some of your site specific settings might not exhibit the problem, but without seeing a complete clone of your site, I can’t even start to test for this. Also, as your theme is a premium/paid theme, this means I can’t test compatibility here either.

So what I suggest is the following:

Make a clean local install of your site; install WordPress v3.3 on a machine which isn’t your public web server. Export your post content and users from your public site and import it into the local install.

Then add and install each plugin, (the order isn’t important, the order you’ve listed them in is as good as any) but still use the default WordPress theme, not your premium/paid theme. For each plugin’s installation, log out and log back in again, configure the plugin to match the settings from your live site and then, again, log out and log back in again.

Finally, if you’re not able to duplicate the problem, then install your premium/paid theme and see if this duplicates the problem.

Let me know how you get on …

-Gary

Hi. Have you made any progress on this? It might also help to enable and check your Apache error log and PHP error log (if your hosting company allows this).

-Gary

Gary,

I haven’t had any time to do as you suggested and probably won’t for awhile. Thanks for your help.

Fair enough. I’ll close this support entry down for now then. If you want to reopen it then feel free to do so. Alternatively, you’re more than welcome to get in touch outside of the forums; see https://www.garygale.com for contact details.

-Gary